1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to provision of services to mobile users, and more particularly, to presentation of content to mobile users by means of a mobile communication system. The content is presented by means of mobile user equipment which receives the required data from a transmitter of the mobile communication system.
2. Description of the Related Art
A mobile communication system can be seen as a facility that enables a mobile user to communicate with one or more other entities such as another user equipment and/or nodes implemented within the communication system. A typical mobile communication system provides mobility by means of wireless communication between mobile user equipment and transceiver elements of the communication system. The mobile user equipment may be served by base stations of a mobile telecommunication network, such as a public land mobile network (PLMN). The mobile user may move from a base station of the mobile network to another base station. The mobile communication systems may also allow the mobile user to roam in mobile networks other than that to which the mobile user subscribes to. A mobile user may also be served by communication satellites of a satellite based mobile communication system.
The mobile users may be provided with a possibility to use various services, and the communication may comprise communication of data that relates to provision of a service. The services are typically provided by entities referred to as service providers. The services provided for a user may comprise any service than can be provisioned by means of the communication system. For example, a mobile user may be provided with a possibility to make and receive calls, to browse a data network (e.g. the Internet), to send and receive emails or other text messages, to receive various types of content from a server entity (e.g. video data or other image or audio data), to attend chat rooms, to use various other value added services such as the presence service, location based services, or to attend games, competitions, voting services, and so on. This specification concentrates to provisioning mobile user equipment with data based on which a mobile user can be presented content such as audio presentations, visual presentation or audiovisual presentations and so on. The audiovisual presentations are often referenced to by the term ‘multimedia’.
The service providers may provide services based on different service architectures. For example, the service provision may be based, without being limited to these, on a third generation (3G) multimedia service architecture, an intelligent network (IN) architecture, a service node based architecture, or any other service architecture. In some service architectures the service provisioning is at least partially handled by means of the user equipment.
A possibility is to ‘push’ data to the user equipment. That is, the service provider sends data to user equipment without being especially requested by the user to do so. The data push may be triggered at the network side e.g. periodically or in response to an event triggering the data transmission. Push type services are typically used for broadcasting of advertisements, general announcements, news and so on to mobile users.
Users may also participate by means of the mobile user equipment in various types of interactive services such as game and quiz shows. These shows are typically presented to the user by radio or TV programs. The communication and participation has traditionally been handled with voice calls. In more recent applications short message service (SMS) has been utilized for the provisioning of interactivity.
It is possible to provide the content by means of the push services. However, the content that is wished to be presented for the users may be such that it requires more data to be transmitted than is possible, for example, by means of the SMS. The recent proposals to overcome this problem include use of all IP (Internet Protocol) networks for the interactive services. The all IP networks enable the users to receive more content data. The enhanced content is sometimes referenced to as ‘rich content’.
The current definitions in different types of push services define the mechanism how to subscribe and deliver the content to the end users. For example, session initiation protocol (SIP) push content data transmission enables transmission of substantial amount of data. The SIP push content data can also be pushed to a plurality of users.
However, the Inventor has found that although the basic mechanism may already be in place, the proposals may still not work satisfactorily in all occasions, especially when considering the capacity limitations of the mobile communication systems.
More particularly, the inventor has found that provision of a service for a mobile user may require transmission of such amounts of content data that this cannot be conveniently done in real-time, i.e. when the user actually uses the service. Content data may need to be delivered to a substantial number of mobile users at the same time, e.g. during a TV or radio program, thus setting substantial capacity requirements for the data transmission system. It may not even be possible in all networks to push content data to a large number of mobile users within a substantially short period of time. The capacity limitations may become even more an issue when more services are made available for mobile users. Furthermore, the capacity limitations are worsened by the fact that the number of mobile user equipment subscribing to modern mobile data communication systems offering possibilities for a wide range of new type of services increases rapidly.
Thus, in order to be able to extend the push service to enable better and more flexible service offering for various services such as interactive services (e.g. games, quiz shows, mass events) and so on, an improved data provisioning functionality may be needed.